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A procession of publicans and a beggar following the coffin of Madam Geneva; attacking the Act preventing distillers from retailing or selling gin to unlicensed premises. Engraving, 1751 from the Wellcome Collection.

The temperature in the early afternoon was 36 degrees Celsius; the heat index was 45 degrees. As Ige would say, if the weather were a person it would be a corpse. Some of us are already spending lockdown doing passable impressions of corpses.

The Philippine Star reports that in Binmaley, Pangasinan, a man was arrested for transporting bottles of gin inside a coffin in a hearse. Now a coffin sounds like it would be useful in a heist: presumably no one would want to open it. Perhaps the driver had seen an American gangster movie set in the Prohibition Era, in which bootleg alcohol was smuggled in a casket. But you would need several wailing, preferably hysterical mourners to dissuade inspectors from opening the coffin, and mourners are not allowed while social distancing. Also the coffin needs to contain a body, and the bottles should be hidden under it, or in a false bottom. So A- for concept, D for production design, and F for execution.

I heard that coffins complete with cadavers may be rented for the purpose of setting up an instant casino on the street. On the pretext of raising funds for funeral expenses, “friends” of the deceased play card games at the wake, blocking the street while motorists curse and cops look on. It’s a tradition.

In the news photo, the coffin is full of bottles of the gin nicknamed Marca Demonyo, after the label painted by Amorsolo showing the archangel Michael crushing Lucifer underfoot. “Coffin full of gin” could be the title of a song by Tom Waits (Jockey Full of Bourbon). I remember a report in The Economist that said Filipinos were the world’s largest consumers of gin; the Brits have nothing on us. The driver was attempting to circumvent the liquor ban by faking a funeral; unfortunately he did not consider that people do not drive around in hearses. (I’ve heard of eccentrics/vampire cosplayers who sleep in coffins—he should’ve consulted them.) He was apprehended when he tried to sneak past a quarantine checkpoint.

On the same day, a former policeman was shot in Quezon City for trying to make a getaway in a van full of brandy. The liquor ban in many parts of the country has racked up its own death toll, which includes the people who died after ingesting a mixture of paint thinner, toothpaste, and coffee. For sure the liquor industry has delirium tremens as the thousands (millions) of liters of alcohol that might’ve been guzzled in lockdown languish unsold.

Just before 8pm, the undying policeman protagonist of the blockbuster TV series Ang Probinsyano, already in hiatus during quarantine, went into a coma as his home network ABS-CBN went off the air. The largest broadcast network in the country was ordered to stop operations as its franchise had expired. The renewal of said franchise is hanging in Congress. ABS-CBN has long been the subject of Malacañang’s ire—presumably for reporting critical of the government (where to begin), and something about campaign advertisements that were not aired in 2016, payments for which were reportedly not returned. The screen going blank gave martial babies horrifying flashbacks to their 70s childhoods, and there was no alcohol to dull their terror.

This was followed by plenty of spewing (what the Canadian PM called “speaking moistly”), so it’s a good thing people are wearing masks. Politicians contradicted each other, as did different agencies within the same department; lawmakers made statements containing nothing in particular, they just had to make statements. Leaving aside what the people think of press freedom, there goes the primary source of real news exactly when we need it most, plus 11,000 jobs in the halted economy. All we need now is for the aliens from outer space to reveal themselves.